PWAC/MagNet Conference 2 June 2010 Imagining Toronto Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris 1 The Imagined...

PWAC/MagNet Conference 2 June 2010

Imagining TorontoCopyright © Amy Lavender Harris

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The Imagined City

Imagining TorontoPresentation for PWAC / MagNet

ConferenceChestnut Hotel, Toronto

2 June 2010

The City as Text

PWAC/MagNet Conference2 June 2010


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“Before the real city could be seen it had to be imagined, the way rumours and tall tales were a kind of charting.”

Michael Ondaatje, In the Skin of a Lion. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1987



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“The city as we imagine it, the soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, nightmare, is as real, maybe more real, than the hard city one can locate on maps, in statistics, in monographs on urban sociology and demography and architecture.”

Jonathan Raban, Soft City. London: Collins Harvill, 1988.

“There’s a city inside the city, […] the city at the center of the map.”

[Robert Charles Wilson, “The Inner Inner City.” From The Perseids and Other Stories. New York: Tor, 2000]



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“Paracartography implied the making of maps, city maps, a map of this city, but not an ordinary map; a map of the city’s secret terrains, the city as perceived by a divine madman, streets rendered as ecstasies or purgatories; a map legible only at night, in the dark. […] What I rediscovered that autumn was my ability to get lost. Toronto is a forgiving city, essentially a gridwork of streets as formal and uninspiring as its banks. Walk in any direction long enough, you’ll find a landmark or a familiar bus route. As a rule. But the invention of paracartography exercised such trancelike power that I was liable to walk without any sense of time or direction and find myself, hours later, in a wholly new neighbourhood, as if my feet had followed a map of their own.”

[Robert Charles Wilson, “The Inner Inner City.” In The Perseids and Other Stories. New York: Tor.]


GEOG 4280 | Imagining TorontoCopyright © Amy Lavender Harris

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“Nothing in a city is discrete. A city is all interpolation.”

Dionne Brand, 2002. Thirsty. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart.



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“The literature is still catching up with the city, with its new stories.”

Dionne Brand, quoted in Vanity Fair, 2005

The City of Neighbourhoods



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There is no city that does not dreamFrom its foundations. The lost lakeCrumbling in the hands of

brickmakers,The floor of the ravine where light lies

brokenWith the memory of rivers.

Anne Michaels, “There Is No City That Does Not Dream” from Skin Divers (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1999).



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“I loved the river even here. I loved how dark it was, how it held its secrets with the dignity of the damned. I loved how grass and even small trees managed to sprout out of the concrete that held it captive. …. I loved the sounds, even if they were the sounds of man rather than the sounds of nature. I loved the rattle of the old bridges as the streetcars went over them. I loved the lap of the water as it licked at concrete. I loved the wind in the slim weeds that grew between the railroad ties. I even loved the sound of the rush-hour trains, the buzzing traffic, the sound of my own feet on the asphalt path. I think what I really loved in those moments when I was cupped in the hand of the city was life.”

Rosemary Aubert, Free Reign (1997: 104-105).



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“There is a vast part of this city with mouths buried in it …. Mouths capable of speaking to us. But we stop them up with concrete and build over them and whatever it is they wanted to say gets whispered down empty alleys and turns into wind. People need to be given a reason to listen.”

Michael Redhill, Consolation (2006: 263).



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“[Toronto is] a score of cities joined together by geographical propinquity which has resulted in a bizarre incestuous relationship between the Junction and Rosedale, Cabbagetown and Forest Hill, etc., etc.”

Hugh Garner, quoted in The Underside of Toronto (1970: 12).



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“Cabbagetown was a strange hybrid of a community in the urban core of Toronto. It wasn’t more than a mile square. The streets were narrow and tree-lined, and the architecture Victorian in style, if not uniformly in vintage. Whatever else it was, it was old and quaint and well-situated. It had become a slum when the middle class had fled to the suburbs but now it was undergoing a renaissance as a new middle class flooded back into the city’s heart. The houses, grand or ramshackle, row or detached, were being resuscitated. The results were mixed: some fine homes were artfully reclaimed to a serviceable beauty, grander homes refurbished to something of their erstwhile splendour, and some less noble shacks given a glamour far exceeding their original value. Propped and stayed, their faces lifted like vain dowagers, the ersatz competed with the splendid, and pretension sidled up to good taste hoping to be mistaken by the uninformed. […] Cabbagetown wasn’t merely housing, it was something of a movement spearheaded by the historically minded, the community spirited and, not least of all, the speculatively shrewd.”

Tim Wynne-Jones, The Knot (1982: 23-24).PWAC/MagNet Conference2 June 2010


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“Toronto’s a place where the climate’s unkind, / where the people are dismal and narrow of mind, / where an antique administration rolls on, / like a bunch of small villages rolled into one.”

The Brothers-in-Law, “Toronto the Good.”



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“Sixty-nine Rosecliffe Park. The name still sounds romantic, exotic, out of a storybook or a film. Sometimes it’s hard to believe you are here, at this address, sitting inside, thinking these thoughts. [...] But then you step out in the common corridor with its all too real down-to-earth sights, sounds, and smells, and you wonder: This, Sixty-nine Rosecliffe? And you realize that you’ve not left Dar far behind. “Twenty floors.” Nurdin once did a small calculation for his wife. “Twelve homes in each—you have two hundred and forty families—that’s three good-sized blocks of any street in Dar.” Except that the variety found here at Sixty-nine would not be found in any street in Dar. Here a dozen races mingle, conversant in at least as many tongues.”

M.G. Vassanji, No New Land (1991: 59-60).PWAC/MagNet Conference2 June 2010


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“The title of my article came to me immediately:WELCOME TO TORONTO

I wondered if the title was part of the overall word-count. If it was, I’d just made three dollars in about ten seconds. I could get used to this “buck a word” business. A buck a word. In other words, if I wrote: “Toronto is an interesting city,” I could buy myself lunch. If I wrote: “Toronto is a very, very, very, very, very interesting city,” I could buy myself dinner.

Unfortunately, though, Toronto isn’t all that interesting a city, and after the title I was stumped. One of the things I love about Toronto is how dull it is. […]

At night, after walking five, six, seven hours at a stretch, I’d open my notebook to find maybe two lines of notes: “Toronto – city of neighbourhoods?” Or: “Toronto – flat, dull suburbs.”

David Eddie, Chump Change (1996: 106; 116-117).



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“While she had been at Waycroft her life had been divided into two separate sections as definitely as the city itself was divided by The Hill which was far more than a simple geographical line of demarcation. To live below the Hill was, metaphorically, to live on the wrong side of the tracks [….] Karen had always liked living below the Hill, and had never made any secret of this. It was only below the Hill that you came into direct contact with the core of vitality that was the true essence of the city. Here you were acutely and excitingly aware of the steady heart-beat of a really great metropolis, fresh blood continuously pumped into it from the four corners of the globe.”

Phyllis Brett Young, The Torontonians (1960: 148).



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“A city with a future, like an individual with a future, could never remain static for long, could not afford to expand indefinitely along the lines of least resistance. The suburbs, as they now existed, were the city’s lines of least resistance. The towering buildings to the south were the real yardstick of its stature.”

Phyllis Brett Young, The Torontonians (1960: 319).



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“Toronto has an ambience like a civilized dinner party where all the best people are invited, all the guests go home early, and there isn’t too much to clean up in the morning.”

David Eddie, Chump Change (1996: 140)



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“This is my refuge. It is where I can be invisible or, if not invisible, at least drunk. .... The smell from the market doesn't bother me. I've been here before, me and the old lady. We know the price of things. Which is why I feel safe in telling stories here.

Dionne Brand, "At the Lisbon Plate“ (1989).



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“Every city has a self-image, and every city’s self-image is almost precisely a representation of what it is not, what it is least.”

Noted Canadian sociologist John Seeley on “Toronto the Good’ quoted in The Underside of Toronto (1970: 9).



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“We moved into a flat in Rosedale, on Standish Avenue, backed up against the CPR main line. It’s not a Rosedale Street, Inspector, if you know what I mean. The rich people in their mansions lived farther south, away from the main line railway track and the constant noise of passing freight trains. But it was Rosedale, don’t you see? That’s what made it important to her.”

Hugh Garner, Death in Don Mills (1975: 282).



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Our arrival at the convergence of St. Clair Avenue and Keele Street was heralded by a horrific stench. A stench that even overwhelmed the occasional whiff of our squealing cargo of hogs.

“What on earth is that odour?” enquired Gerry, sitting at the truck’s window seat.

“Ah,” replied Archie of Acton, “that’s the smell of money my good friend. That’s the big C.P.”

“C.P.?” I asked.“Yep. C.P. That’s Canada Packers lads. Biggest goddamn

meat packer in all of Canada. You’re smelling the start of some damn fine eating. Makes you wanna grab a pork chop dripping in fat, don’t it,” laughed Archie. […]

After bidding thanks and farewell to our benefactor from Acton, we walked east along St. Clair until we found a small park with a couple of shade trees. It was boiling hot, the humidity suffocating, and the smell of animals being transformed into human fodder, nauseating.

Matheson, Hogs and Cabbagers (1996: 105-106).PWAC/MagNet Conference2 June 2010


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“Tuyen’s family is rich, newly rich. They have a giant house in Richmond Hill, where rich immigrants live in giant houses. Richmond Hill is a sprawling suburb where immigrants go to get away from other immigrants, but of course they end up living with all the other immigrants running away from themselves – or at least running away from the self they think is helpless, weak, unsuitable, and always in some kind of trouble.”

Dionne Brand, What We All Long For (2005: 54-55).



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“We live in Parkdale, a village in the west end of the city of Toronto, made up of Victorian mansions that used to border the lake. Women with parasols and bathing suits down to their calves, women with consumption, walked the beach, Sunnyside Beach. Now the highway sits on top of us, a beleaguered crown, turning Parkdale into a tired beauty queen. Feathers in her hair. Crinolines in a knot. She is grand. She is slumped. She is a rooming house with clapboard siding, transoms, cornices and turrets. Her voice is parched and playful. She is all invitation. She will take you in when nobody else will.”

Claudia Dey, Stunt (2008: 19).



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“If you lay your ear on the tracks you can tune into many of the different conversations that are happening on the various streetcars, the talk reverberating down into the seats, into the wheels, then shaved and sent spinning into the tracks which zip them back, forth, up and down the city’s streets. The loudest of the conversations manage to reverberate themselves further, up from the rails into the wheels of other vehicles, further, even, into the bodies of the passengers.”

Darren O’Donnell, Your Secrets Sleep With Me (2004: 57).



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Walking the Imagined City



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“[t]hey are all walkers, and their tread along the city’s streets is intent and focused, We see them moving at the pace of dowsers looking for streams buried beneath the pavement; and dowsers they are, these seekers for the fugitive urban imaginary in the solid matter of the city.”

John Bentley Mays, ‘Walking off the Map.” The Walrus, May 2006.



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“If it is true that forests of gestures are manifest in the streets, their movement cannot be captured in a picture, nor can the meaning of their movements be circumscribed in a text. Their rhetorical transplantation carries away and displaces the analytical, coherent proper meanings of urbanism; it constitutes a “wandering of the semantic” produced by masses that make some parts of the city disappear and exaggerate others, distorting it, fragmenting it, and diverting it from its immobile order.”

Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (1984: 102)



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“Walking then is a spatial acting out, a kind of narrative, and the paths and places direct our choreography. This regular moving from one point to another is a kind of mapping, a kind of narrative understanding. Paths link familiar places and bring the possibility for repeated actions. Different paths enact different stories of action. Walking is like a story, a series of events, for which the land acts as a mnemonic.”

Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks, Theatre/Archaeology (2001: 138).



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Literary Walking Tour: City Hall and the Ward



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“A CIVIC SQUARE IS A SQUARECONSTIPATED BY COMMITTEE ISA CUB IS A CANADIAN IS ACIVICTORIAN SQUARE IS A”

“But in Toronto—the site of these letters, there is no Place; only the Civic Square, is scarcely Hero nor Heroine.”

[Scott Symons, Civic Square. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1969]



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“I sat one morning by the Moore, off to the westten yards and saw though diffident my city nailed

against the skyin ordinary glory.It is not much to ask. A place, a making,two towers, a teeming, a genesis, a city.”

[…]

[Dennis Lee, Civil Elegies. Toronto: Anansi, [1968] 1972.



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[…]The spectres drift across the square in rows.How empire permeates! And we sit downin Nathan Philips Square, among the sun,as if our lives were real.Lacunae. Parking lots. Regenerations.Newstand euphorics and Revell’s sign, that notone countryman has learned, thatmen and women live thatthey may make thatlife worth dying. Living. Hey,the dead ones! Gentlemen, generations ofacquiescent spectres gawk at the chromeon American cars on Queen Street, gawk and slump and

retreat.And over the square where I sit, congregating above the

Archerthey crowd in a dense baffled throng and the sun does not

shine through.”PWAC/MagNet Conference2 June 2010


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“Holy Holy Holy Holy Holyand I sink with my bagunder the floor of striptease jointswhere sad men paste their eyesbetween the jittery cheeks of young girlsto leave them there for blue assholesand walk out blind in the noonday starecarrying their genitals in briefcasesto Philips Square where all around themmen and women are falling in a steady drizzlefrom the tall taller tallest buildingin a race with the golden rain to the pavements”

Irving Layton, “Tale of Two cities.” Lovers and Lesser Men. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1973.]



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“The cab left them at the bottom of Nathan Phillips Square on Queen Street. […] Two hundred metres to the east was the red-brick old city hall, downgraded now to a traffic court. It had been deemed unsuitable for the city of the sixties, which had built itself something that looked like a broken ice-cream cone with a tumour in the middle. The plaza was made up of wide, square concrete panes floating over an unseeable depth. The inch-wide cracks between the panes suggested that they were movable, that if you stood on the wrong one, you’d be sucked down into a tar pit that flowed under city hall.”

[Michael Redhill, Consolation. Toronto: Doubleday, 2006.]



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“He headed across the square to where Henry Moore’s Archer was slowly acquiring its splendid patina, turning green with age and doing so with great dignity.

[…]‘I have the most extraordinary feeling that I know this

thing,’ he thought, and then realized that he had spoken aloud, for a bum who was sitting on a nearby bench got up and joined him in scrutinizing the sculpture.

‘You like this thing?’ he asked. ‘I don’t like this thing. Nobody likes this thing, they just get used to it, that’s all. Piece of crap, if you ask me.’

‘I mean I feel like I know it, it’s almost as though I’ve been inside it, you know? I’m the only man in this city who’s seen it from the inside.’”

[Gwendolyn MacEwen, “The Man in the Moore,” from Noman’s Land. Toronto: Coach House, 1985.]



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The same bum was sitting on the same bench when he went back to the square at the City Hall a day later.

‘I remember you,’ he said. ‘You’re the guy who thinks you were inside the sculpture or something.’

‘It might interest you to know,’ said Noman, ‘that I was inside of it once.’

‘Oh come on!’‘I kid you not, my dear man. You see, yesterday I

remembered something. It’s not much, but it’s a start. See down at the bottom where it says H. NOACK—BERLIN? Well that’s the name of the foundry in Germany where they cast Moore’s stuff—and I was there. Yes, I was there sometime in the sixties, I remember it now. I visited the foundry, and since I knew something about welding, one of the workers let me crawl in through the square hole in the piece and weld a couple of seams inside.’



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‘You mean it’s hollow?’ asked the bum.‘Of course it’s hollow. […] God, I remember it like it

was yesterday.’‘You mean you were literally inside it? Like in real

life?’‘I was. And I remember workers left things like

cigarette butts and coffee cups inside. I left a ball point pen in there; it fell from my shirt. I can’t prove it to you, but if they ever opened this thing up they’d find the pen in there. A red pen. A Parker.’”

[ibid.: 59-60]



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“All Trueman’s cows were breachy by nature; and for years they were headstrong in the notion that a cow-path should be made across the field in front of Osgoode Hall. The heavy and formidable iron fence along Queen Street stands to this day in front of the law courts as a memorial to John Trueman’s cows. […] For generations, the Bench and Bar of Ontario have continued to sidle and dodge themselves into the precincts of Osgoode Hall through the curious stock-yard openings that were specially designed in Europe to keep out Trueman’s cows.”

[Patrick Slater [John Mitchell], The Yellow Briar. Toronto: Macmillan of Canada, [1933] 1941.]



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St. Johns Ward, a municipal district once bounded by College and Queen Streets on the north and south and Yonge Street and University Avenue on the east and west, was segregated from the rest of the city by culture as much as by class. In a 1913 magazine article called “Toronto’s Melting Pot,” a journalist refers derisively to the “seething, sweaty centre” of the Ward with the “Hebrew disorder” of its “garish” shops, the “slatternly decay” of its “tumbledown houses,” the “dirty little wretches” who play in its streets and the “unintelligible muttering” of its residents.



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Most Toronto residents avoided the Ward, a district social reformer Mary Joplin Clarke claimed was “generally regarded by the respectable citizens of Toronto as a strange and fearful place into which it is unwise to enter even in daylight.”

Arguing that a combination of social and racial prejudice lay at the heart of the Ward’s reputation, Clarke added, “The danger that lurks in these crowded streets is not always clearly formulated in the minds of those who fear it, perhaps it is the dagger of an Italian desperado of which they dream—perhaps the bearded faces of the “Sheenies” are sufficient in themselves to inspire terror—but at any rate the fear remains and probably it could best be analyzed as Fear of the Unknown.”



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“Katya turned into a side street, then, with an anxious glance at Emily, down a narrow alleyway between two apartments. The stench of overflowing privies filled Emily’s nostrils. She began breathing through her mouth. This was even worse than the smell in their own lane. They came out of the dark into a patch of light. There was a tiny yard filled with debris—a legless chair, a wheel from a cart, a mattress sodden with something that gave off an acrid smell, a jumble of rusting iron rods. [...] “Magda there.” Katya pointed to what appeared to be cellar steps leading down to a small landing. Then she turned and darted away.”

[Barbara Greenwood, Factory Girl. Toronto: Kids Can Press, 2007]



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“In a part of the city that is ever shrouded in sooty smoke,and amid huge, hard buildings, hides a gloomy house ofbroken grey rough-cast, like a sickly sin in a callous soul.

Streams of wires run by it wailing in the murky wind.Two half dead chestnut trees, black and broken, standwearily before it, subdued by a bare rigid telephone pole.

The windows are bleary with grime, and bulging, filthyrags plug the broken panes.

Torn blinds of cold judas green chill whatever lightSifts through the murky air.

Dirty shutters sag this way and that like dancerssuddenly stopped in aimless movement.

But the street door smiles, and even laughs, when theHazy sunlight falls on it—

Someone has painted it a bright gay red.[Lawren Harris, “A Note of Colour.”]



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“Are you sad when you look down city lanes,

Lanes littered with ashes, boxes, cans, old rags;

Dirty, musty, garbage-reeking lanesBehind the soot-dripped backs of blunt

houses,Sour yards and slack-sagging fences?[...]Are you sad?Are you like that?

[Lawren Harris, “A Question”]



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“[O]n to University Avenue, so broad and sweeping under its elms that he was puzzled to behold on the east side, rows of rickety shacks which seemed popping with queer people. He let himself digress here into what was evidently a large slum in which ramshackles on the street edge were screens for tumbledown tenements behind; where banana vendors, street-pianos, bearded patriarchs, Irishwomen, Billingsgaters, slouchy negroes, senoritas and swarming juveniles jostled in a cosmopolis of humanity—the famous St. John’s Ward.”

[Augustus Bridle, Hansen: A Novel of Canadianization. Toronto: Macmillan, 1924.]



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If the Ward was a source of fear among most respectable Torontonians, it was attractive to bootleggers, hustlers, con artists and the city’s dissolute, who seemed to recognise something of themselves in the Ward’s crooked corridors.

The protagonist of Morley Callaghan’s 1928 novel, Strange Fugitive—a work crime writer James Dubro has called “the first of the modern gangster novels”—is a restless man who chafes at the confines of his domestic life and finds himself drawn to the corner of Yonge and Albert Streets, where he loiters among the preachers and pickpockets at the perimeter of the Ward.

One night, having lost his job and walked out on his wife, he decides spontaneously to rob a bootlegger and set himself up in business in the Ward. In doing so, he crosses a boundary that is as much moral as it is geographical. In the Ward—or so it seems to Harry—the ordinary rules no longer apply, and he revels in the amoral unreality of his life and his rising prominence in the city’s underworld until, perhaps inevitably, a gangland gunfight brings him down in a hail of bullets.



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Given how sharply Callaghan contrasts the Ward, a warren of “Chinese merchants, chop-houses and dilapidated roughcast houses used for stores” with the practically pastoral topography of Harry’s abandoned marriage, it might be tempting to infer, as many contemporary commentators did, that the Ward exerted some dark power over the city, ensnaring upright citizens with its alien alchemy.

But if the Ward was the white, middle class city’s Other, it should be understood not as the “respectable” city’s opposite but rather as its visible shadow, a projection of characteristics deemed incongruent with the public image of Toronto the Good but, in truth, as much a part of the city’s character as Orange parades, church picnics and prohibition.



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Nonetheless, even as “respectable” Torontonians patronized the Ward’s speakeasies, brothels and burlesque halls, and provided reliable trade for bootleggers like Harry Trotter, as Steven Hayward makes clear in The Secret Mitzvah of Lucio Burke, ultimately the Ward was understood best simply by its contrast to Toronto the Good: “The city is ninety percent British, and Protestant. [...] The city’s policemen and judges and magistrates and lawyers and most of its doctors and every one of its mayors are members of the Orange Order. The rest of the people are pressed into a dirty corner of the city called the Ward [...] where the Italians and Jews live—the wops and the kikes, as they are mostly called by most of the city.”



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Despite being “pressed into a dirty corner” of Toronto, the Ward loomed large in the city’s imagination. One of the district’s biggest problems was its visible persistence.

Disturbed that slum conditions continued to define the district even in the 1950s, in “City Hall Street” Raymond Souster described the Ward as “an open sore on the face of God” and added,

“O this courtyard never changes,it’s still the same dirt, same rot, same smell,same squirming, crawling tenement, tin-roofed sweat-

boxon the lower slopes of Hell.”

Perceived as "a cancer of the modern civic organism" and a threat to Toronto’s self-image, inevitably the Ward became a target for commercial redevelopment and civic improvement projects destined to eradicate it.



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In 1909 a section of the Ward was demolished to make room for a new general hospital, and a surging commercial real estate market during the subsequent decades propelled the rapid conversion of speculative slum-holdings into lucrative commercial properties in Toronto’s expanding downtown core.

Even a significant increase in owner occupancy in the remainder of the Ward did not stem the tide for long. During the Ward’s long decline its residents moved west toward Spadina Avenue, where many of them worked in Toronto’s garment industry.

At the turn of the century the bulk of Toronto’s Jewish population had been concentrated in the Ward, but by 1931 Kensington Market was home to eighty percent of the city’s Jews. Between 1947 and 1955 the City of Toronto acquired and finally expropriated properties in the south end of the Ward—by then known as Toronto’s first Chinatown—to build Viljo Revell’s City Hall, and after that the Ward was no more.



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PWAC/MagNet Conference 2 June 2010 Imagining Toronto Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris 1 The Imagined...

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